Decrepit
buildings. Graffiti and sign language. Bricks, endless bricks. The backdrops
to Martin Wong's allegorical paintings seem hardly the stuff of a utopian
vision. Yet precisely such a vision is revealed in a new retrospective
of his work sponsored by SFSU and the Chinese Historical Society of America.

Alongside dark urban imagery, Wong's pieces are laced with multicultural
metaphors, countercultural allusions and homoeroticism, transforming
familiar and even stereotypical scenery into powerfully original compositions.
His works have appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Whitney
Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art and other venues.

Johnson,
also the director of the SFSU
Fine Arts Gallery, says the art community
has sometimes
oversimplified Wong, who died of
AIDS in 1999, as a chronicler of despair and cynicism. That point was
stressed at Wong's largest show to date, titled "Sweet Oblivion," held
in 1998 at New York's Museum of Contemporary Art.

But a closer look at Wong's output, particularly from
his time in San Francisco, suggests the artist's lifelong fascination
with utopian ideals,
Johnson says. Such is the case with "Polaris," a richly colored
painting of children of different ethnicities playing jacks in the heavens.
Other pieces reference the utopian pageants Wong witnessed in hippie-era
San Francisco and the Tai Ping egalitarian movement in 19th century imperial
China.

A friend
of the Wong family, Johnson was involved in a 1993 exhibit of Wong's
work at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Johnson said that Wong was a creature of his environment, and in his
life he inhabited two realms: the gritty artistic magnet of New York's
Lower East Side and the nostalgic bustle of San Francisco's Chinatown.
Born in Oregon in 1946, he grew up in San Francisco amid icons of counterculture
juxtaposed with vibrant Chinese American subculture. His visual vocabulary
began to emerge while studying at Humboldt State University in Arcata,
where he also worked briefly as a courtroom artist.

He continued to divide his time between Humboldt County and San Francisco,
including a design stint with the politicized gay theatre group The Angels
of Light, until departing for New York in 1978. Settling into the pastiche
of immigrants, hippies and blue-collar workers who filled the tenements
on the Lower East Side, Wong soon made the emblems of urban decay --
crowding, graffiti, bricks -- his signatures.

His New
York years earned him the most fame and set the tone for how many have
come to view his work. After being diagnosed with AIDS, Wong
moved back to San Francisco in 1995 to be with his family and continued
producing new work up through the year of his death.